TORONTO — The Fairmont Royal York ballroom has hosted enough industry galas to know the script. On Sunday night, the Toronto International Film Festival rewrote it.
Among the 10 honorees at the eighth annual TIFF Tribute Awards — the festival’s biggest annual fundraiser — was Fan Bingbing, accepting a TIFF Special Tribute Award presented by CHANEL.
It was her first formal recognition from a major North American film festival since 2018, when a Chinese tax-evasion investigation upended her career and briefly turned her disappearance from the screen into an international story about celebrity, state power and the price of public scrutiny.
She has continued working since, across Chinese and international productions, but the symbolism of the Tribute Award is not subtle. The festival is saying something with the booking.
The evening arrived at the midpoint of TIFF’s 51st edition, running September 10 through 20 at venues across the city. The gala’s proceeds support the festival’s year-round talent development programs, with particular emphasis on expanding access for filmmakers who do not arrive through conventional industry pipelines. That framing is not incidental to what the honoree list accomplishes: Fan Bingbing’s TIFF-presented film, Wayne Wang’s “Diary of a Mad Old Man,” in which she stars opposite Gabriel Byrne, premieres in the Gala Presentations section on September 18, five days after tonight’s award.
TIFF Chief Executive Cameron Bailey described Seth Rogen as sharing “his wildly Canadian talents with the world” in TIFF’s official announcement, which is one way to summarize a career that began in Vancouver and has produced studio comedies, prestige animation, and an ongoing personal-advocacy effort around Alzheimer’s disease awareness since his 2012 congressional testimony. Rogen receives the TIFF Norman Jewison Career Achievement Award, named for the late Canadian director who made “In the Heat of the Night” and “Moonstruck.” Rogen’s claim on the Jewison legacy is not purely biographical; he has two films in this year’s festival. “Babies,” directed by his wife Lauren Miller Rogen, is a personal project about infertility and parenthood. “Tangles,” an animated feature he produced, concerns his mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and draws from the graphic memoir they co-authored together in 2016. The Norman Jewison Award, at its best, lands on someone whose body of work exceeds genre. On Sunday night, it landed on one.
Helen Mirren, 81, receives the TIFF Share Her Journey Groundbreaker Award, which the festival has used since 2017 to recognize women who have expanded what female-driven storytelling looks like in the industry. She brings her own film to TIFF: “A Talent for Murder,” a thriller adapted from the stage play she performed in London’s West End, which screens as a Gala Presentation. Mirren arrived in January at the Golden Globes as the recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award. As this fall’s awards season accelerates across both film and television, the distribution landscape for autumn festival titles continues to take shape at Venice, Toronto, and Telluride simultaneously.
Penélope Cruz receives the TIFF Special Tribute Award presented by CHANEL, the same category as Fan Bingbing, which TIFF uses when a career resists a single categorical description. Cruz arrived in Toronto with two films: “La Bola Negra” and Florian Zeller’s “Bunker.” Two films at the same festival in competition-adjacent slots is an unusual position; it also means that whatever critical reception either receives lands on the same red carpet evening. Zeller directed “The Father,” which won Anthony Hopkins an Academy Award in 2021. “Bunker” is his third collaboration with Hopkins and his first major work since.
Isabelle Huppert receives the TIFF Tribute Performer Award and brings the comedy “All About Corinne,” directed by Marc Fitoussi, her third collaboration with Fitoussi following “Copacabana” and “Victoria.” The pairing is one of French cinema’s more productive recurring duos, and Huppert at 73 remains an active figure on the festival circuit across more languages and directors than most performers would attempt in a decade.
The honoree whose presence at TIFF carries the longest-latency significance is Lee Chang-dong, recipient of the TIFF Tribute Ebert Director Award. He is presenting “Possible Love” in Special Presentations, his first feature since “Burning” in 2018. That film, which starred Yoo Ah-in and Steven Yeun, earned Chang-dong a Cannes FIPRESCI Prize, placed on several publications’ best-films-of-the-decade lists, and attracted an international following for a director who had already spent a decade as South Korea’s Minister of Culture. The eight-year gap between “Burning” and “Possible Love” is not fully explained by public record. The Academy has developed an institutional shorthand for Korean directors after “Parasite”; Chang-dong predates that shorthand and operates outside it.
Rounding out the honoree slate: Rosalind Eleazar, who receives a Tribute Performer Award and appears in Chris Rock’s directorial debut “Misty Green”; Bassam Tariq, whose “Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother” marks his return to feature filmmaking after several years in television; Siân Heder, whose opening-night film “Being Heumann” is her follow-up to “CODA,” the 2022 Best Picture winner that made her the most-watched Apple Original Films director working; and cinematographer Adam Pietkiewicz, recipient of the TIFF Variety Artisan Award.
The Tribute Awards serve multiple purposes simultaneously. They are a fundraiser. They are a prestige-builder for films that screen later in the festival’s run. And they are, in the industry’s current Oscar-forecasting apparatus, one of the first ceremonies of an awards calendar that accelerates through the end of January, watched closely by distributors assessing whether a Gala Presentation title can survive the distance from September to March.
What the Tribute Awards are not is a predictor. Fan Bingbing’s film does not premiere until September 18. Lee Chang-dong’s “Possible Love” is five days from its first public screening. The awards tonight are being handed to people whose best work in this festival, for several of them, has not yet been seen.
